The war fragmented the Palestinians into three different groups: the Palestinians in Israel,in the Jordanian West Bank and in the Egyptian Gaza Strip. The rest were refugees scattered in refugee camps in the Arab world and exilic communities around the globe.

The legal status of the West Bank remains one of the core issues of controversy in the Arab-Israel dispute. After the 1948 War, the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control and the West Bank under the control of Jordan. Both areas came under Israel control after the 1967 war. The Israel legal position as to the status of these territories was that they were not the territories of a foreign state hence legally Israel did not have to apply the IVth Geneva Convention. Israel undertook to apply the humanitarian provisions of the Convention. Israel unilaterally withdrew its armed forces and civilians from the Gaza Strip. The majority of the population of the West Bank are Arab Palestinians who, under international law, have a right of self-determination. The 1947 UN Partition plan recommended that the West Bank be part of an Arab state. The 1922 League of Nations Mandate, however, promised the Jewish people the right to create a Jewish National Home in Palestine, which at the time, included the West Bank. Israel and the PLO have agreed to negotiate the future status of the West Bank. The majority of the Arab population of the West Bank are under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, however, the major part of the territory of the West Bank, including all Israeli settlements remain under Israeli military administration. To date, the parties have not yet managed to agree on what will be the final status of the West Bank.

This chapter consists of three sections. I begin by analyzing how PIJ navigated once strife erupted between Fatah and Hamas in 2007, and how the movement resorted to dialogue and negotiations in attempts to de-escalate the conflict. I proceed in the second section to see how these attempts to preserve unity were abandoned on the ground once Hamas attempted to establish law and order in Gaza, which led to violent clashes between it and PIJ. I discuss in the last section how PIJ navigated regionally with the eruption of the Arab Spring. We see that although PIJ is ideologically resistant to the Arab regimes and a supporter of the Arab Spring, the necessity of not alienating its patrons overrides this principle in practice.

The aim of this chapter is to highlight the impact of trauma and intervention with Palestinian children. A reanalysis of secondary data of previous work in the field using the words trauma, Palestinians, intervention, PTSD, anxiety, depression, Gaza Strip, and West Bank was entered in web-based research databases including Medline, PsycINFO, and Scholar Portal. The severity of traumatic events is changing and the types of traumatic experiences now include seeing mutilated bodies on TV, hearing and seeing shelling, exposure to sonic bombs, and witnessing home bombardment and demolition. PTSD prevalence ranged in children from 10 percent to 71 percent while the rate of PTSD in the West Bank ranged from 35 percent to 36 percent. The rate of anxiety ranged from 28.5 percent to 33.9 percent, and depression ranged from 40 percent in children of Gaza and the West Bank to 50.6 percent. The general mental health of children rated by parents and teachers was 20.9 percent and 31.8 percent. Studies showed risk factors that interfered with well-being such as being a boy, living in a large family, low socioeconomic status of the family, exposure to domestic and political violence, and being an orphaned child. Other risk factors included children in the labor force, with physical problems, and living near the border areas. Intervention studies had equivocal results when using psychodrama, school mediation, writing for recovery, and teaching children recovery techniques. This review showed that Palestinian children’s exposure to war and conflict leads to negative outcomes including mental health problems that triggered the start of community intervention programs. These programs did not change the negative impact of trauma, which highlights the need to find other ways to protect children in Palestine and help them cope with their daily life adversities and war.